Shaw Festival
Through September 7
THE MOUNTAINTOP Shaw Festival/Studio Theatre
In every great man or woman, there is the clash of humanity and reality.
Katori Hall’s “The Mountaintop” is a look at Martin Luther King Jr. (Kevin Hanchard) in the final hours before he was gunned down in a seedy hotel in Memphis.
It is just hours after he had used the Moses example from Exodus, that he had seen the Promised Land and would never get there.
He’s ill and lonely, buffeted by aides who aren’t sure he should be spreading his effort to include opposition to the war in Vietnam and the Poor People’s Campaign.
King has missed an endless calendar of family events and had his house bombed.
He’s tired.
It’s well after midnight and King doesn’t know he will die in the afternoon.
He has sent Ralph Abernathy for a pack of cigarettes and discovers the Lorraine Motel no longer has room service.
The operator has agreed to send up coffee.
There’s a knock on the door and the justifiably-paranoid King worries.
It turns out to be the maid Camae (Alana Hibbert), with the coffee and her packs of cigarettes.
What Hall does is suggest they will wind up in bed, because King had a reputation for womanizing, something used by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI.
King wants to talk to some one, especially some one who can give him some Pall Malls and whiskey for his coffee.
Camae belies strongly in what King is doing while providing a sermon of what he should say some day if he decides to turn against Whites.
He’s not ready for that.
The sexual tension didn’t ring true and it’s hard to see why until we learn she’s an apprentice angel sent to bring him home.
The Civil Rights leader is skeptical until she produces an agricultural miracle.
Then, he tells her he’s too busy to die and he has too much to do.
Camae makes a quick land line call to God and she tells King his time is done and the angel will take him away.
In the end, King gets a chance to see this flowing and flashy look at what will happen after he’s gone, pictures and videos and stars across the stage.
The two cast members are pretty good but they aren’t really much better than the cast Subversive Theater used for its production of “The Mountaintop” earlier this year.
This production benefits from Shaw regulars Judith Bowden for design, Kevin Lamotte for lights and Andrew Smith’s computer projections.
Director Philip Akin does a strong job with the two-person cast and the cramped set of the Lorraine Motel room as it was that April night in 1968.
For those of us who lived through the Sixties, with so many seeing King as almost a secular saint, this is a different view of the man and the minister and the leader.
It’s interesting and humanizes him and that may be a good thing for all of us.
A human can accomplish great things while a secular saint may be so far above us that it’s hard to join hands to accomplish something.
That’s why “The Mountaintop” is worth seeing, before it moves to a theater in Toronto for several weeks more.
A.W.
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